Everything Wrong With Meat in America in One Headline

Let’s go step by step through this to disseminate the lies, the misunderstandings and the flat facts of the situation.

Statistically, that is not a family farm. Family farm’s don’t have open liquid shit pits. Less that 1% of the animals killed in this country come from family farms. The likelihood of that being a family farm is small, but sure, let’s grant that.

This murderous shit pit is 42 feet in diameter in this story. The surface area of such a pit is 1385.44 feet. That’s at a depth of zero inches. This pit is 8 feet deep. That gives us a very fragrant 11,083.52 cubic feet of liquid shit. These numbers call to mind your average suburban swimming pool, perhaps at a community center. Nothing Olympic. Just your average swimming pool full of shit from livestock fed mostly poor quality food.

This is exactly what every family farmer has in his backyard. Right? It’s right next to the new wooden playhouse the Nelson’s put up in back of their house. Or even a mile from the Nelson’s. I think on a hot day, the Nelson’s would choose to stay inside.

Imagine you are on the precipice of such a lake. Take a deep breath through your nose. Hmmmm…. Aaaahhhh. I anticipate the 4-year-old was well aware he was near such a promising pond long before he fell in.

Now here’s why this story is so fucking damning. Occasionally, the fecal kick-up, the shit mist, that comes off these ponds is instantly fatal to anyone within a couple feet. Well, OK, not instantly fatal, but you want it to be at that point. What it really does, all the ammonia, methane, sulfur and other very toxic compounds, is knock you unconscious. Then you fall down and drown. Dictionary reminder kids: drowning happens when your lungs become unusable because they fill with liquid. This is not the time to snap back to consciousness. With your lungs full of liquid shit. Man, does anyone else smell bacon cooking? Damn that’s luxurious. Anyway…

And let’s fucking hope this kid wasn’t playing in a backyard that contains such a pond. The California state senate found in a study that “animal waste lagoons emit toxic airborne chemicals that can cause inflammatory, immune, irritation and neurochemical problems in humans.”

Such a fatal link exists to a type of bacteria found in fecal mist (methicillin-resistant Staphlococcus aureus) that as of 2005 killed more Americans yearly than AIDS (18,000).